It's okay, the whole point of their fast release cycle is that you'll probably see that feature within the next 6 weeks rather than in 6 months from now. Idiots who don't understand the version system will whine about it, but that's a very tangible benefit of releasing more often.

Or 17.0 ESR which is also out now and that will replace 10.0 ESR over the two upcoming releases. So if you want to roll out Firefox in your organization, be advised that 10.0 ESR is going out of support in only a couple of months.

ESR is only supported for a year. It allows for 2 months in between versions before one version is dropped.

IE is going the same route with annual updates. IE 10 is an exception due to the incompetence of the Windows 8 team forcing WDDM 1.2 and DirectX 11.1 onto it which requires significant backporting.

So this time next year IE 11 will be out or in RC states and the following IE 12 etc. Organizations need to learn to adapt to change more rapidly. It is not like a minor release is anything like the huge rewrite of apps that resulted from IE 6 to IE 7 or even 8. Your browser should always be updated at a regular basis.

That is true, however under Linux you get an update download of Chrome (now Version 23.0.1271.64) about 48MB while a Firefox update is less than 9MB. Not sure about MS Windows since I don't use it now, however i do remember when I did that Firefox updates where actually deltas which were only a few MB.

As of writing (my last update was 2 days ago) I still only have version 16.0.2 of Firefox. Now compare that with the latest version of Chrome which is 23.0.1271.64.

Can't you just zoom in the website with Ctrl-+ and get the same effect? That's what I do on Windows with a 3840x2400 display. Admittedly some websites specify fixed pixel sizes for things so they appear scrunched into the top left corner, or in a thin dribble down the middle, but I don't see how you can fix that without violating web standards. Does the 'Retina' mode render something that says 100 pixels as 200 pixels instead?

Except that the UI looks really fuzzy on a Retina display w/o having Retina support. That's one of the larger complaints on non-retina apps. The way around that is to set the MBPr to 2880x1800, but then everything else is small as hell.

Funny, that picture looks just fine to me on my non-"retina" display. It's almost as if you don't need a retina display to see images!

But wait, there's more. When that image is embedded into a webpage, it's embedded at the standard, non-"retinal" resolution. So when displayed on a "retina" display, it will look "blurry."

Except apparently Wikipedia uses Safari's made up extension for "retina" images, so it would work there. (Hopefully Firefox will stick with standards and not make up extensions for non-existent problems.)

But on the vast majority of webpages, all you're going to get is a standard-res image. Making "retina" basically useless.

How would text rendering be a problem for the browser? I'm assuming that Mac OS X isn't written by complete idiots, and that non-"retinal" apps get upscaled with proper high-DPI text rendering, meaning that the only thing Firefox has to deal with is scaling images.

This is true, right? Apple wouldn't do something completely stupid like require all apps that want to do "retinal" be completely rewritten to deal with that, would they?

You seem to be thinking that "retina support" is only about rendering the webpage at a higher resolution. It's also about the program's UI. And no, Firefox did not automatically use HiDPI rendering of text in webpages or its UI therwise they wouldn't have needed to fix that. That is an issue with Firefox not OS X as you seem to be trying to blame. Your focus solely on the webpage images misses the point entirely.

Really? I never thought I see the day where (non-troll) people on/. would fail to appreciate the value of a higher resolution display. I understand the "retina" marketing gimmick is bullshit but at least someone is pushing resolution beyond 1080p. I certainly hope we don't keep our current screen resolution as a standard for the web indefinitely. Some people are going to have to start adopting higher resolutions at some point.

It's a larger resolution but in a physically smaller area (the new retinal display macbooks are actually smaller). That means that the display can actually be harder to see especially for those who do not have good vision (or even moderate vision). If you scale up text and graphics to the same size it was before, all the retinal stuff does it smooth out fonts more, and if you could never see the jaggies in the fonts in the first place it's pretty much pointless.

If you scale up text and graphics to the same size it was before, all the retinal stuff does it smooth out fonts more, and if you could never see the jaggies in the fonts in the first place it's pretty much pointless.

Obviously it's pointless for text we can read text fine on current generation displays the point is more detail.

Plus it's stuck on an absurdly small phone screen or on the laptop.

I really don't think you've seen one of these displays in person. You can actually see the difference when there's higher PPI the size of the screen is irrelevant.

Additionally, any site that renders text will look better. Firefox 17 doesn't render text at the higher DPI supported by new MacBook Pros, causing every site to look blurrier than it would in Chrome or Safari.

For the record, the same is true in Windows: change the scaling factor of the OS, and Firefox simply scales the same low-res text. It's unclear whether the change I mentioned in nightlies will fix Windows as well; I simply haven't tried it yet.

I'm waiting for F128:|I find this release model as ridiculous as people who don't flush the toilet after going. Major versions are for major changes. As they would say in engineering: change in form, fit and function

I've ran the numbers through our compute cluster here at JPL and have determined that Firefox version numbers are on an exponential climb and will reach critical mass and achieve self awareness around the 20th or 21st of December THIS YEAR with the creation of a singularity on the entire planet's web browser population.

By an odd coincidence, this morning I was reading Arthur C Clarke's classic SF short story 'The Nine Billion Versions Of Firefox' where the universe comes to an end when they release version 9,000,000,000. I had hoped it wouldn't happen in my lifetime, but it's looking increasingly likely now.

That's crazy. Last time I heard a firefox version number joke was right after I fell off my dinosaur and into my wooden underwear. Good job, I'm glad to see you spiced up that dead horse with a few other dead horses. That should bring an old joke back to life.

I believe the reason is that work actually starts on 17 around the time of 15. There's always three versions being developed in parallel, each one a few weeks ahead of each other. So a bug fix may get into all currently developed versions.

Yeah, I wonder how long other features like Speed Dial, or Tab stacking will last before someone copies them.

I wish that people knew where all of these fancy features are coming from, that way Opera would have more funding to innovate. They certainly haven't slowed down since they created tabbed browsing eons ago...

I wish that people knew where all of these fancy features are coming from, that way Opera would have more funding to innovate.

While the cynic may see it as chump change especially in multi-national mega-corp terms, in 2011, Opera Software's net income came in at a comfortable 24.6 million dollars on an operating income of 156.5 million, a substantial increase over the year before. Not quite as much as Mozilla who netted 43 million in 2009 but for a small company of 777 employees just doing their thing making their browser, it's not too bad. Bear in mind too that Mozilla resides in the US while Opera is in Norway so a direct 1:1 c

When I read the headline, "Click-to-Play Plugin Blocks", I was thinking that plugin content would be blocked from doing anything unless the user clicks a play button. Just like FlashBlock, in other words. That would actually be a good thing. A good change, in a new version of Firefox: I might've fainted.

But no, what it actually means is this:> Mozilla will now prompt Firefox users on Windows with old versions of Adobe Reader...

Oh, yes, please.

We need this because Adobe Reader doesn't already prompt every single user who has it installed to the effect that they need to upgrade it, a bare minimum of three per hour. We definitely need our web browser to bug us about this also, otherwise we might not know that three new versions of Adobe Reader were released during the time it took us to download and install the version we currently have. Well, I mean, okay, in theory we'd _know_, but without this extra reminder we might occasionally go up to fifteen minutes at a time without _thinking_ about it. Mozilla must protect us from that horrific fate.

It means they can now kill off Flash and promote their one world domination via HTML5. HTML5 has always been the goal of Mozilla, they don't care about the users they only want their dream to come true.

And I WANT the older versions of Reader. The new Acrobat Reader version are complete crap.

Except that I think reader 7 & 8 have the best UI, for things like search, moving forward and back in history, etc. All others I have tried are clumsy. I use Preview on my Mac at work but am not at all happy with it.

The whole thing is stupid because no one ever should have added the possibility of malware in a read-only non-executable format! What next, RTF viruses? Well, I guess I thought the same way about HTML and didn't think anyone would be stupid enough to add features to it to make it dangero

My main objection to HTML5 is that it is a step back toward the bad old days of HTML4 when parsing the markup was a royal pain in the hind end. XHTML's concept of well-formedness is so immensely useful, I cannot imagine anyone who understands the implications ever wanting to go back to the horrible morass of SGML-based markup. XML-based markup is so much easier to manage, both for the content creator (e.g., web developers) and also for software developers (browsers, editors, server-side stuff, indexers, a

To enable click-to-play for all plugins go to about:config in the location bar and set “plugins.click_to_play” to true.The feature is considered still under development which is why it's not enabled by default.

Considering that there is at least one exploitable vulnerability per month in Adobe plugins and the number of computers getting pwned through that vector, this is still a good thing... even if it is not as useful as something like flashblock or noscript. Can't have the user in control over their own experience now can we? External entities should be in control.

Every company bitches to high heaven about updating constantly, every piece of software does daily update checks, sometimes with a background process, and you get a billion prompts a day to update. How is it possible to even run old software unless people go out of their way to disable the idiotic, intrusive update messag...

Works for me but I'm not running an old virus ridden windows machine like many people as I know what I'm doing with my computer. That's why I also know Chrome isn't that fast and has many flaws the google fanboys don't want to talk about given that google tracks them and knows all the questionable sites they've been on.

Tabs die too quickly and it poorly handles broken HTML which causes it to use up all it's memory and cause the thing to be unsable are the two biggest. The biggest reason I quit using it is because it's performance was just generally much more poor than Firefox.

Its problem is that it's always used more memory and CPU than pretty much any other browser but they focused on making it feel fast which is fine but that little trick seems to be failing. That or I guess they expect me to have a computer more pow

for browsing 2-3 pages, chrome is good, startup fast, but start to load more tabs, demand more from it and you will see the cpu and specially the ram going up.During the last year and half, firefox manage to rebuild its memory usage and today have the best long term memory usage of all.

What I find more fascinating in TFA is that Firefox has added simple support for HTML5 Sandboxes. You can apparently specify whether the data inside the IFRAME is allowed to access outside domains, etc. (if I am reading it correctly; I am not actively involved in web design at the moment and so am a bit behind the curve; does anyone know how good this sandbox function is compared to other software/browsers?).

The sandbox [mozilla.org] adds security restrictions plus "tokens" for explicitly allowing the things that you, the site developer, want. The main purpose of the restrictions is to prevent content within an iframe from accessing content in or related to the parent page. For example, lots of ads are loaded in iframes, the sandbox attribute can prevent JavaScript in the ad from executing. The site Can I Use [caniuse.com] is a decent place to look for which browsers and browser versions support particular parts of HTML5, CSS3, etc. The i

I thought from the description that this would require clicking *all* Flash, Java or other plug-in applets before they would run. That would be true security (until the dumb masses find and click one they shouldn't). I thought this would be a relief for when I'm using a fresh copy of Firefox; I could possibly go a bit longer before installing Adblock, NoScript and the rest. But no... it only blocks this crap from loading without a click when an "old" version of a plug-in is used. Yay. Talk about pointl

This would be more of an issue if they had still been supporting PowerPC, since Leopard was the last OS X version for PPC (PPC support ended with 3.6.x.). It seems silly though that they discontinued Leopard support in the version right before the ESR. At least all Intel Macs can upgrade to Snow Leopard, and TenFourFox [floodgap.com] is keeping PPC on life support for now. Still, Mozilla's discontinuation of Mac platforms is widely disproportionate to their Windows counterparts.

The amount of effort needed to support multiple versions of OSX at the same time is much larger than the amount of effort needed on Windows, because Microsoft usually bends over backwards to not break compat, while Apple will go out of its way to do so.

Combined with the lower user base on Mac and the faster OS update cycle of Mac users, this means that dropping support for old MacOS versions is a much simpler call than dropping support for old Windows versions: They're more work to support, and the number o

As a web developer, I would love to see FF support WebP. As an end user, I wish the UI was responsive and it took advantage of more than 1 of the cores in my multi-core CPU. Do they even make single-core CPUs anymore?

Acrobat (aka "reader") nags the shit out of me to the point where its in my better interest to just the fucker off, then nothing gets updated until the next reinstall, which is a good way to encourage updating

Firefox 17 is unusable for me - the font rendering appear broken on non-ClearType enabled systems and my Bookmark Bar links no longer loads things when I click them?! (I have it placed on my Navigation Bar). Broken beyond use for me: I have just installed latest Pale Moon release instead and migrated my profile, apart from a bit of tweaking of the status bar everything works fine for me. The point that Pale Moon is allegedly faster than stock FF releases rendering wise is secondary to me but quite nice to k